Come on… Mr Manager!
We will investigate how the engagement and welfare of the people within an organization affect efficiency, resourcefulness, and growth. And how a thriving, diverse and inclusive work culture can foster creativity, innovation, and fast progression on business goals.
Employees are without a doubt the most important resource a company has, and their welfare will reflect in their performance and ultimately the bottom line. Concentrating on employee well-being can help organizations withstand hardships, and even thrive in difficult economic times. It is thus, of high value to create a thriving work environment and an inclusive culture.
We will exemplify this through, well, you guessed it – GAMES.
Imagine This:
Your colleague is not hitting deadlines and is often complaining about the task at hand. You consider what might be the problem and you realized your colleague is super frustrated and will probably leave the company before the task is done. You realize the colleague is in a freelancer position and the contract is running out. Suddenly you also realize the work your colleague has been doing for the last 12 months might be lost in a split second. Besides that, the frustration and comment from the colleague explain the irritating voices you heard, at the last Friday wine bar. Voices, you didn’t think you needed to react on!
Dear Mr Manager (Boss….), in most cases you might think of the yearly review conversation to solve issues like the above, or you would react with a bit more attention to voices and not pay further attention than just lending your ears. Basically, you react like a typical person in a middle manager position by putting your head down and wishing the complaints to vanish – in other words, the ostrich…. Something you never experienced anywhere.
Please, Mr Manager Boss, become a leader and take care of the problems related to thriving!
This allows your organization to become stronger and more resilient to market changes - faster. Let me give you arguments why it makes good sense to spend your time on well-being and thriving at work.
- The cost of replacing a colleague is very high - between €20.000 - €60.000 if you do a simple search online - and this is only the cost of lost speed and direct task.
- If you include the culture and changes related to the culture when someone is leaving, the cost will be much higher.
- As a leader, you might think you know your organization and how your people are doing. But you don’t.
- 91% of all leaders think they are caring… but only 56% of the employee say they are happy; https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6945474517783764992/
- We also know the future of the workforce will be connected to a workplace in a more volatile way. We participated in a research project looking at thriving at work as an academic worker to come up with ways to work with loser connection to employees. Something I believe will be a core competence if you want to sustain a healthy business in the future.
- If you don’t create a thriving workforce, no matter the type of employment, you will not be able to retain, get or grow your employees.
Creating a thriving work environment, basically means, you need to step up to a workforce that is wanting…….. no, NEEDING you to be interested in the people-side of the organization.
The question is, how will you step up to the challenge?
Coming up...
In the coming months, we at Actee will focus on the topic of thriving and well-being in the workplace, and we invite you to join our journey on LinkedIn.
We will investigate how the engagement and welfare of the people within an organization affect efficiency, resourcefulness, and growth. And how a thriving, diverse and inclusive work culture can foster creativity, innovation, and fast progression on business goals. Employees are without a doubt the most important resource a company has, and their welfare will reflect in their performance and ultimately the bottom line. Concentrating on employee well-being can help organizations withstand hardships, and even thrive in difficult economic times. It is thus, of high value to create a thriving work environment and an inclusive culture. We will exemplify this through, well, you guessed it – GAMES.
Below is a sneak peek at some of the games we will be sharing with you in the coming months.
Agile Thriving
As a player, you enter the IT-consultant house Flying Monkey as a newly appointed agile project manager whose job it is to manage the organization's employees with different skills, through an agile transformation.
This game comes in short and long versions.
The Cooperative Company
After several years of working as salaried employees, four people decide to found their own cooperative company. A cooperative company is a company run and managed on democratic principles, and with high on; a strong sense of community, a healthy work environment, and good conditions for personal-, competence- and leadership development. All four co-owners have had more than enough top-down management. They agree to start their own company. Each co-owner has a slightly different educational background. They have a common desire to form a good work-life balance, a healthy business, with work that is interesting.
All four seek to make a difference in the world as a corporative entity.
Create A Good Working Environment
In this game, you are faced with a hostile work environment where your goal is to turn the environment around. You will have to consider the already rooted work culture and how your changes will affect their motivation and work-life balance.
Retain Talented Employees
One week after the end of the summer holidays, the new employees on temporary contracts have now been introduced to their work tasks. However, today is the day the new employees begin to work in the open office environment.
You will need to consider in the onboarding process, how you introduce the progressive workplace and value-driven organization. You must also manage the L&D and talent development for Simon…
Help The Freelancer Join the Team
The game aims to prepare employees and leaders to handle some of the challenges that value-driven organizations face.
This is a game about onboarding a new freelancer into a value-driven organization.
SIW - Socially Innovative Knowledge Work
The SIW project aims to examine the future labour market regarding new technology and organizational forms. By doing so, it aims to offer innovative solutions to future labour market challenges.
5 SIW games on thriving and well-being, at Actee
Search for:
- Agile Thriving
- The Cooperative Company
- Retain Talented Employees
- Create A Good Working Environment
- Help The Freelancer Join the Team
We encourage you to take a look at the study from Gallup, on how employee engagement drives growth, in 2012. Gallup conducted its eighth meta-analysis on the Q12 using 263 research studies across 192 organizations in 49 industries and 34 countries.
We furthermore suggest reading Deloitte’s article ‘The C-suite's role in well-being’ on how health-savvy executives can go beyond workplace wellness to workplace well-being—for themselves and their people. An interesting finding in the article is:
“Only 56% of employees think their company’s executives care about their well-being, while 91% of the C-suite think their employees believe they care about it.”
Our games aim to mediate the complexity, as well as the importance of well-being in the workplace. We hope that our games can be a method to ensure an increased understanding and future focus on the matter!
We look forward to playing these games with you over the next weeks!
Look at Deloitte's Stats Here
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